Fran’s Reviews > The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times > Status Update

"roman era miners" --it feels like a bit of an oversight to not in some way indicate that most of them would have been enslaved, no? maybe i'm being too sensitive. but "miners" implies the modern idea of an employed miner, not the absolutely nightmarish existence that the enslaved were forced to endure in the mines. correct me if i'm wrong/mixing this up with ancient Greece though...

"That statement was confirmed in 1988, when German archaeologists discovered a very large thigh bone of an extinct animal in the ruins of the Temple of Hera on Samos. The big fossil had been brought to the temple and dedicated to the goddess Hera by a pious Samian in the seventh century B.C." Yeah I'll go ahead and incorporate that into my belief system. I am Looking Hellenistically...

"Plutarch’s statement means that, some 1,700 years before Cuvier, fossil mas­todons were correctly recognized as a species of elephant! The leg­end of a great battle between the Amazons and Dionysus’s Indian elephants in the distant past was a rational attempt to explain how in the world elephants came to be buried on an Aegean island."

This is a GIANT leap in logic imho.